The Criterion Collection
Essays
Apr 9, 2013 — This essay by novelist, playwright, and culture critic Gary Indiana originally appeared in the 1992 book Everything Is Permitted: The Making of “Naked Lunch.” Burroughs’s work tends to affect people like a Rorschach test. It separates cultural conservatives from avant-gardists,...
Apr 9, 2013 — This review by film critic Janet Maslin originally appeared in the December 27, 1991, edition of the New York Times, and appears by permission of the author. Naked Lunch, adapted by the dauntless David Cronenberg from William S. Burroughs’s 1959...
Mar 26, 2013 — Charlie Chaplin manages to make a ruthless murderer likable in his brilliant satire of middle-class morality.
Mar 20, 2013 — Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s adroit masterpiece is war film, dark comedy, historical drama, poignant romance, and a portrait of the modern woman.
Essays
Mar 18, 2013 — Using a 1958 murder spree as a narrative springboard, Terrence Malick fashioned a fractured fairy tale about American innocence lost.
Mar 13, 2013 — The slimiest movie monster of them all is part of—and perfects—a great tradition of unstoppable outer-space invaders.
Mar 12, 2013 — Working in America, German master Fritz Lang contributed to the anti-Nazi effort with this nightmarish, surreal tale of espionage.
Feb 27, 2013 — More than eighty films into his career, Kenji Mizoguchi made this emotionally devastating masterpiece, from a story by Ogai Mori.
Feb 19, 2013 — Elia Kazan’s masterwork is a vivid, tough look at a time and place, and a transcendent human drama.
Feb 18, 2013 — Performances Hiroshima mon amour (1959) is a groundbreaking portrait of a world come undone. Even more memorably, thanks to the brilliant precision of Emmanuelle Riva’s performance, it’s a study of a woman unraveling. In this first leading role in an...